Panoz AIV

Open-air motoring in the modern vein.

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When I was a teenager, way back in the early 1950s, lumpy little Porsche 356s and toylike Ferrari barchettas held no appeal. The ride I lusted after was the steatopygous, cycle-fendered Cad-Allard J2X.

I just got my turn behind the wheel, after all these years. Only the millennial Allard is actually the Panoz AIV (aluminum-intensive vehicle), a somewhat refined version of the classic topless, trunkless, sit-on-the-back-axle-and-watch-the-front-wheels-dance roadster.

Yes, the Panoz --pronounced pay-nose, not pan-nozz --does have a top and a trunk, but the former is intended solely to keep out the rain while you park under an overpass after being dumb enough to go out without first checking the Weather Channel, and the latter is only big enough to hold that top and two floppy side curtains collapsed into a vinyl bag.

This is a car intended purely for play, when the weather is fine and the temperature is 60 plus. "That looks like fun," said the 50ish guy about to climb into his Cadillac when I pulled into the motel parking lot, feeling numbed by a chilly run on a Michigan interstate. "Well, fun some days," he said, laughing at my grimace and immediately getting the picture.

Panoz sells about a hundred AIVs a year, which means either that you can sell a hundred of anything or that it takes awhile to make friends with a Panoz. This is not a car that encourages hopping in for a 10-minute test drive and coming back to the dealership smitten.

Climb aboard a Panoz in lazy-driver mode, or with a condescending attitude, or expecting it to be a Porsche Boxster, and this bad boy will eat your lunch, burp, and ask for a doggie bag. Its steering is as fast as a Formula Ford's, and the suspension is racer stiff. At speed, the slipstream buffeting even past the optional ($235) wind wings is painful, the only solution being to drape your left arm over the doorsill to block some of it. Which makes precise steering even more difficult. The result: a darty, unpleasant car that seems to jump all over the road, with a power-to-weight ratio close to that of the new Porsche 911 Turbo, and dialed-in oversteer always lurking in the little trunk.

Yet in the hands of a skilled driver accustomed to throttle steer and super-precise wheel inputs, the AIV can be made to sing -- particularly on a smooth surface. And sing quite literally, for the yowl of the 305-hp, quad-cam aluminum Ford at its 6800-rpm limit is almost worth the sticker price all by itself. (Panoz plans soon to upgrade the AIV with a 320-hp version of the same engine, possibly with a sequential shifter.) You can politely idle past any cop, but jump in and punch it, and you're in court -- 0 to 60 takes just 4.6 seconds, and the quarter flashes by in 13.5 at 103 mph.

On second thought, let's not talk about "jumping" into a Panoz. The consequences are too painful. Each side of the cockpit is about the size of a sack-race bag and harder to get into, with high, wide sills and minimalist doors. In fact, if you're rich enough to afford a Panoz -- $64,985 for a toy, after all -- chances are excellent that you're way too old and out of shape to put one on.

Indeed, owning a Panoz is a good reason to buy a set of those cute little booties that racers wear. The pedals are so close together, and offset well to the left because of the enormous bell housing, that even my quite ordinary size nines occasionally got two pedals at once. When you nick the gas while braking for a red light, it creates truly unintended acceleration until you frantically dump the clutch. And when you tag the brake hard while declutching to upshift at the redline, you'd better hope you've lost any tailgater.

Early-production AIVs were a bit agricultural in quality, but this most recent example is a solidly built piece. The coffin-cover hood shakes on rough surfaces, but the extruded-aluminum chassis is as stiff as a bridge, and previously doubtful fittings such as door hinges look newly substantial. The fiberglass hood bulge fitted to accommodate the tall cam towers of the Ford SVT V-8 that replaces the original pushrod Ford is a major kludge, complete with Pep Boys trim gasketing around its circumference, but it's obviously a lot more economical than creating new hood tooling.

There's not even a power outlet for a radar detector, and the heater vents put out less warmth than does the center console, which leaks considerable heat from the powertrain. There's a radio, but don't plan on using it for anything but monitoring the Emergency Broadcast System if you happen to be driving during a nuclear attack.

So who's complaining? Nobody ever intended the Panoz AIV to be a grocery getter. We should be thankful there's a car out there that's this unusual, this entertaining, this capable of curling your nose hairs. And for what is, after all, about the same price as a 911 Carrera or a Jaguar XK8.